depends on the situation, but for boarding I usually shoot jpeg. I shoot RAW for almost everything else, and sometimes RAW for wakeboarding. You just have so much more latitude for post processing with raw.

I can assure you that most of the "professional" sports photographers always shoot raw. In fact several wakeboarding magazines will only acept photos in raw. If you are shooting for fun, than shoot Jpeg and save the memory, if you are turning to a mag or into a poster, than raw is the way.

The benefits of shooting RAW once you learn the work flow are just too numerous to go over in one post. Even though you can fix a myriad of problems in PS even with Jpegs it's just much easier with a RAW image. Besides there are many applications like Apple's Aperture which do wonderful RAW conversions automatically using intelligent algorithms dialed in for each camera type.

I wouldn't shoot jpeg for sharpening reasons alone, the in camera sharpening just never looks that good.

Daniel, yes I believe I have the converter, does that program perform all the same functions that the camera does in processing an image, just with the ability to adjust it?

I guess I should have said it like this:

I have all the software that came with my camera and adobe 7.0, will this be enough to properly process images taken in RAW? And will I be giving anything up in the processing department by going this route?

Also: listed above is all the pp programs I have. Are there any extra programs such as noise ninja that you guys have found to be a great deal of help? I want the biggest bang for my buck when it comes to pp programs since I rarely perform the tasks.

The original camera RAW plugin will give you RAW processing with PS7 but you'll need to hack the plugin to make it work with your cam since Adobe hasn't supported the stand alone plugin for a while now. Canon's software is pretty good now and even has some batch features which make it way easier to use. A lot of guys swear by it. if you use a Mac I'd highly rec. Aperture.

Matt, yes, you have the ability to adjust all the parameters that the camera does, including but not limited to exposure (to a point), white blance, contrast, sharpening, and color tone.

My workflow looks something like this: Download the photos to my computer, open the Canon Raw Processing software, tweak the images, process them down to jpegs (for smaller prints) or tiffs (for larger prints). Once I've done that, they are ready for touch up and cropping in Photoshop.

According to my sources, and you know who you are , noise ninja is good for processing when you have shot at iso 800 or higher and need to remove excess noise from the image.